Deep fat fryers, broadly speaking, are known in the prior art. U.S. Pat. No. 3,296,954 shows an example of such a prior art machine which includes product cooking baskets adapted to be indexed in a circular path by operation of a vertical axis drive relative to a cooking tank.
The objective of the present invention is to improve on deep fryers of this class through the provision of a machine which is considerably more compact and less complex in construction and therefore more operationally efficient, and less costly to maintain.
Another object of the invention is to provide in a deep fryer for french fried potatoes and the like a simplified and reliable product infeed device, whereby at one cooking position or station of the machine a predetermined amount of the food product is delivered to each of four quadrant cooking baskets which are indexed in succession to three other cooking positions at which the baskets dwell for sufficient periods of time to cook the product in each basket at the end of the fourth period of dwell, where each basket is elevated to release the cooked product into a retriever basket at the fourth and final cooking position.
Another objective of the invention is to provide in a vertical axis rotary deep fryer a unique quadrant basket configuration, whereby upon raising of each basket at the product discharge station, the peripheral open side of each basket becomes exposed so that the cooked product can slide by gravity from an inclined bottom wall of the basket into the adjacent retriever basket.
Another object is to provide in a deep fryer of the mentioned class a unique coaction between the product infeed means and the individual cooking baskets, whereby the incoming food product will be deflected outwardly from the interior of the cooking basket toward a large cooking zone where the product will float in cooking oil and will be prevented from returning to the product inlet area of the basket.
Another major area of improvement over the prior art and an object of the invention is the provision of an enclosure for the deep fryer which will preclude the return of contaminated vapors or drippings back into the cooker once they have escaped from the same, thus eliminating a possible health hazard.
Other known United States patents of general interest which do not disclose the above enumerated and other novel features of the invention are made of record herein under 37 C.F.R. 1.56, as follows: U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,472,205; 3,357,341; 3,448,677 and 3,645,196.